THE YUMMY FUR
Piggy Wings ROCK ACTION 8/10
Full-pelt mayhem; retrospective kudos for spiky 1990s Glaswegians
EXPLAINING the creative spasm that sparked him to form ne-plus-indie Scots the Yummy Fur in the early 1990s, John Mckeown explained: “Sonic Youth and Nirvana was all-pervasive; everyone was doing full-on noise and weird sorta stuff and we were just like FUCK THAT!”
If The Yummy Fur yearned for simpler things, that is rarely apparent on this distillation of their two-and-a-half albums and armful of singles. Released on near-neighbours Mogwai’s Rock Action label, Piggy Wings is a dangerously overheated stew of puritan guitar clank, Captain Beefheart melody tumbles and wise-ass witticisms, which comes on like The Fall, Huggy Bear, Bogshed, The Fall, Pavement, the Fire Engines and The Fall.
“I’d like to make a civilised customer complaint,” hectors Mckeown with typical venom on “Night Club”. “Why is Throbbing Gristle considered inappropriate in discos?”a valid question in 2019, but one entirely out of tune with the populist-minded mid-1990s, when Britpop, the Spice Girls and “indie-dance” made the post-bis splurge of “fanzine” bands seem like they were making a rather pious virtue of failure. Disembowelling The Yummy Fur’s 1997 all-sorts compilation Kinky Cinema, NME placed the band firmly in “the sex-depleted, pale-faced student world of miserable gigs in the back rooms of smelly pubs attended by audiences of double figures”.
A fair point, perhaps, but as implausible as it seemed in the golden age of The Verve, the band named after an underground comic were striving for a less tangible form of success. On smart/sloppy opener “Department”, Mckeown struts his mini-manifesto with an ironic thrust of the hips, chanting, “It’s my department, baby, new rock’n’roll.” Neither Blur nor Oasis, it was a music that strove to sidestep cliché and – like the songs of Mckeown’s fiery favourites the Minutemen – have an exhilarating but exhausting debate with itself. Typically meta, their 10-track 1995 debut EP was entitled “Music By Walt Disney But Played By Yuri Gagarin Thus A Political Record”.
However, for all that, Piggy Wings is largely giddy fun; Mckeown contrasts the habits of Glasgow “schemies” and Bryan Ferry cover stars with a joyous strut on “Roxy Girls”, and ponders how he can convert the boys in blue into Residents fans on Link Wray stumble “Policeman”. A jumble-sale T-shirt becomes a symbol of snarling defiance on “The Canadian Flag”, while Mckeown enlists Moors Murderers and Beatles as fellow combatants in the culture war on “Colonel Blimp”, barking: “Crawl through the mud with Hindley, Mccartney and The Yummy Fur.”
Determined not to linger on into another decade, The Yummy Fur deactivated in December 1999. Mckeown went relatively straight with his next band, The 1990s, while some of his occasional bandmates prospered as Franz Ferdinand, but Piggy Wings is the work of a group who couldn’t do normal, try as they might. Not full-on noise, for sure, but a righteous racket.